This paper concerns the issue of googlization of the Internet. It focuses on the study of Google search engines from three countries: Global Google representing Americanization, in opposition to the British and Polish engines. Various theoreticians have proved that google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome has enormous power over the user. This study exposes how and to what extent is Google globalizing local information cultures.
Introduction
The issue of googlization is taking a central spot in nowadays debate about Americanization. Various influencing theoreticians have proved that Google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome often affects how we perceive the world around us. This enormous power gathered by just one company raises many questions, as Google is taking over more and more firms each year.
“Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines had enormous influence on us all. They can shape what we read, who we listen to, and who get’s heard. Whoever controls the search engines, perhaps, controls the Internet itself.” (Grimmelman, J (2008/2009: 940)
One could say that since Google has become a corporate giant, the search engine started to convey messages dependent on various factors, making the corporation a globalizing force that drastically affects the Internet as a medium. According to Grimmelman:
“Call this problem the Google Dilemma. Google has the ability to shape its search results to prefer some websites over others. Indeed, whatever choice it makes – alphabetical, by link count, by politics, by whatever – will result in some sites being on the first page of results and others not.” (Grimmelman, J (2008/2009: 944-945)
Following the notion presented by Grimmelman, the main purpose of this essay is to investigate Google’s local search engines in search of globalization biases. I will conduct the study by analyzing three Google domains (Global, British, Polish), which will be followed by querying all three Google’s with the same phrase in language used by each country. The main target of this paper will be answering the question whether Google is a globalizing machine?
Does each query return global or local sources? How are those sources positioned? To what extent is the British and Polish Google Americanized/globalized? Is any of them glocalized, and if yes, how and to what extent?
Method
In order to describe the sample it is most important to remind that three different googles will be taken under consideration. The British Google and the Polish one will serve as a basis for the analysis in search of Americanization of the search outcome. The international or rather American Google will be seen as a measure for the previous two. This will enable to show how the same query in different cultures, and may give results that are more than ‘linked’ to each other, especially in terms of Americanization.
I have chosen those particular countries for various reasons, coming both from my language skills, as well as from the desire to generate a perfect sample. Choosing Britain and Poland in relation to America, gave me an advantage of having a group that is characterized by both a fully economically evolved country and an evolving one. This gave me a possibility to expose the process of globalization of Google on two different levels. Other important aspects describing the sample group can be found in the language used. Since Britain and United states use English as their native verbal communication, Poland in this case will stand as a counterweight for the exposure of the process described above.
The term that will be used to query the global and two local Googles is ‘war’ (‘wojna’ translated into Polish). I have chosen this particular word for multiple reasons. The first one relates to the universality of the word, as wars have struck humanity since the beginning of mankind. Each war has it’s own history and stories. This will probably remove the international bias of the query, giving each search outcome a chance to produce results typical for each country. The second reason why I have chosen ‘war’ as a perfect word to fit each of the search boxes is the recentness of the topic and its strong connection to journalism. This would give each country a chance to present its own recent view on the issue.
Before conducting the study, I find most important to discuss how should we perceive globalization carried by the search engine.
According to Richard Rogers, googlization is a “political-economy style critique, considering how Google’s free-service-for-profile model may be spreading across industries and cultures” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18). Following this notion, I will search both local Google queries for sites of, one could say, global origins. The idea is that local google search engines will try to boost global or American sites up the query. This related directly to what is described by the same author as Back-end googlization, where he claims that “(…) the power of search engines lies in the combination of its ranking practices (source inclusion in the top results) together with the users’ apparent ‘respect’ for the orderings (not looking further). Google’s model also relies on registrational interactivity, where a user’s preference as well as history are registered, stored and employed, increasingly, to serve customized results” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18-19).
Other important aspect of this study focuses on the following questions: What will be defined as Global? What will be defined as local? In this case global will mean sites of American origins, probably listed in the google.com query. While focusing on the definition of local, I perceive a small problem rooted in the language of two googles. As English language will be dominant across the two platforms, defining local British sites will be particularly problematic. In cases where the URL addresses will not prove the origins of a website, I will look at the content of the sites, trying to determine whether it is rooted in American or British culture. The definition of Local will therefore focus on the cultural origins, country’s history and a general national bias transmitted by each site.
Trying to get the results as unbiased as possible, I deleted all the history and cookies from the Firefox browser. While analyzing all three queries, I looked at the first fifty results of each search, but as described by the quoted theoreticians, the most important results should come from the first pages of each search to which the potential viewer is exposed at most.
Results
Due to the simplicity of the study, there were no major complications at all. While analyzing the produced outcome (appendix 1 and 2) the first notable fact is that Wikipedia takes the first two spots for each of the queries. The second point of high influence can be found by focusing on both British and global Google, where in both cases Warhammer Online EU and Warhammer Online US can be found on the first pages of both queries. On the other hand, Polish Google does not include any of these sites in the first fifty results for the query. Similarly to Warhammer, Internet Movie Database and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are also positioned on the first results pages of both queries. Catholic Encyclopedia appeared on the first page of the British Google’s query, and it was repeated on the second page of the global search, situated on the 11th position. This repetition of websites was extremely common for the global and UK’s Google, where 31 out of 50 websites appeared on both lists (appendix 2).
Appendix 3 exposes some interesting facts about American websites taking over other countries’ Google search engines. Google.com has 41 websites categorized as American. The Polish Google has 44 results that can be marked as typically Polish. These two can be of good contrast to the British engine search results, where only 11 sites can be categorized as purely local. Combining the outcomes of appendices 2 and 3, one can also notice that out of the 31 sites that reappeared in the British query, 28 were categorized as American sites.
The last part of the analysis divided the content that appeared in all three queries into categories (appendix 4). This enabled me to state whether the websites that did not reappear in the Polish google, were of similar subject. I have divided the websites according to the following categories: War related (pink), info and search (lime), games, books, music, movies (orange) and News (blue). While looking at the produced table, the most notable point of interest is the domination of info and search websites in the first half of each query. Out of first 25 search results google.co.uk has 7 web pages categorized with lime color, google.pl gives us also 7 responses, and google.com shows 10 websites of the same category. The second most dominant category is games, books, music and movies; where both the global and British Google list 8 related websites each (4 on the first page of each query). The Polish Google exposes only 5 results of this category, but similarly this grouping dominates in the first half of the search. News websites tend to occupy the second half of all three queries. Additionally, the most interesting fact can be seen while looking at the War related sites, where neither the British nor the American Google does include any of those on the first results pages.
Discussion
The conducted study pointed out some interesting facts about the issue of googlization of the Internet. Each of the analyzed countries did prove that there is an influence of the American web on the rest of the world. Even though Polish Google search engine did not expose much Americanization (not counting the Wikipedia taking the first two positions in the search), it exposed small similarities in terms of the structure of search results. Polish Google can be seen as well glocalized, where the content of the query gives an outcome which is very similar in terms of sites categories, but different while looking at the links. Because of this, the difference in the outcome of links can be seen rather as influenced by the language barrier.
Opposing the Polish version of the most popular search engine lays the British Google that produced tremendously different results. The British engine can be seen as infected by American values. This can be seen in the enormous amount of repetition of American sites in the British search, but can be also found while looking at the similar positioning of websites across both English language searches. All this proves that Google is globalizing its local Internet search engines. This may happen slowly and affect the web step by step as in the Polish example, but in cases where there is no language barrier Google.com takes over local webs and imposes American values upon them.
References:
Rogers, R., 2009, "The End of the Virtual", Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA;
Grimmelman, J., 2008/2009. "The Google Dilemma", New York Law School Law Review, 53:939-950
Appendices:
Appendix 1: Search outcome list
Appendix 2: Reappearance List
Appendix 3: Local Websites list
Appendix 4: Categories list
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